“Well,” he said, “this is technically alife celebration, but yeah. It’s sort of an untapped market. Anyway, I’m kind of busy. And it’s almost exam time for you, right? What do they have you doing at that school, birthing a calf?”
For a moment, I considered telling him the truth. I considered telling him that I was no longer learning things at the expensive private high school where my mom had sent me to “self-actualize,” and “build community.” I considered telling him I was, instead, at his house in Minneapolis, eating out of his sad bachelor fridge and getting ready to sleep in my old room—which now looked like a cross between a home accountant’s office and a prostitute’s garret—but then I heard some shouts from a faraway crowd.
“Oh crap,” he said. “Not good. The smoke is blowing back toward the beach. I need to move the old people. We’ll talk about this later, okay, Tessie?”
And then, just like that, he was gone.
So, I closed my eyes and lay back on the bed.
It was and still is a single mattress bought for a smaller me. A smaller me who peed the bed well into her sixth year and was afraid of the dark until fifteen when she discovered Xanax and droning guitars. I hadn’t slept on it in almost a year until last night. Now the springs are shot and the mattress dips in the middle like a hammock. But, still, I tried to find sleep in the office of death.
It was too quiet, though. I had been conditioned by Quaker school, and now I needed the sound of shouts echoing down the residence hall, and the rustles and shuffles of Emma and her boyfriend trying to have considerate sex across the room when they thought I was sleeping. I needed the sounds of other people, whatever those might be. Reminders that I wasn’t completely alone.
So my attempt at shut-eye didn’t last too long. And instead of making some tea, or meditating, I got up and I sent a long message to the Facebook account of a person who no longer exists.
The vacant person’s name is Jonah.
His account is vacant because he’s not alive anymore.
Still, despite his un-aliveness, I sent my message to him. I told him about trying to go to bed in a room full of eerily upbeat death brochures. I told him about a new iPhone app that identified constellations when you point it at the night sky. I told him I missed his late night texts, his rambling e-mails, and the sound of his laughter on my voice mail. And I told him that I was home, but it didn’t feel like home anymore.
I also told him that everything happening to me was entirely his fault.
That if I hadn’t known him, hadn’t fallen for him against my better judgment, none of this would be occurring. I wouldn’t be wearing the same clothes I wore yesterday. I wouldn’t be lying on my sagging mattress from sixth grade, unable to move. I wouldn’t be a high school dropout. And I wouldn’t be barely holding in the full-body heartache that threatened to swallow me whole whenever I looked at his profile picture.
Then I waited two hours for a response that I knew would never come.
Which finally leads me to everything that happened thismorning, and the story I intended to tell in the first place before I began talking about other doomed things like the universe and Zebulon the rocket dog.
So, I’d like to give this another try, if you don’t mind. My English teacher, Mr. Barthold, once told me that I need to “trust the process,” when crafting a piece of writing, and that “the essential truth is a slippery thing.”
Duly noted, Mr. B. Even though you are an embittered man clinging to a single published novel like a participation trophy, you sounded genuine when you said this. So I shall heed your advice and trust the process. Okay?
Fantastic.
Here goes.
2
I was sitting on the hardwood floor of the guest room in my underwear when I knew suddenly that I needed to go down to the lake. Well, first I needed to get dressed. Then I needed to go outside and walk to the lake. I had been up for about an hour hitting Reload on my browser, waiting, as usual, for a message from the void, when I finally just got up and got dressed. Then I slipped into the streets of Minneapolis with my computer under my arm.
Nobody was out. It was too early, even for Midwesterners. So, I wandered down the middle of the road toward the small lake at the bottom of the hill, where rich people pay a million dollars to stare at water. And while I walked, I tried to be honest with myself about the recent trajectory of my grief.
The truth is I had never lost anyone before. At least nobody my own age. I wasn’t sure what it was supposed to feel like in normal circumstances, let alone my “not normal atall” circumstances. Let’s just say there were complicating factors. Namely: Jonah and I had only met in person one time.
For about five hours.
Did I forget to mention that?
“Boyfriend of the Internet!” Emma had called him once, “BF 2.0.”
And she wasn’t wrong. We had mostly engaged via the device currently under my armpit. E-mail. Facebook. Text-ing. Etc. And now that he was gone, his death felt both like an absence and not. It was true he had never really been here to begin with. Only once did I see him looking at me from across the room with his beguiling gray-blue eyes, or smiling at me with that one crooked incisor that made him look a little devious when he was just trying to be charming. Butsomethinghad been here.
Something I couldn’t bring back.
And in the last two weeks, I had actually been sending him more messages than ever before. Even though I knew he couldn’t respond, I checked my in-box fifty times a day. Click. Reload. Click. Reload. I was sure he would write eventually and tell me it was all a hoax.I’m not dead. I’m alive! It was all a very funny joke on you by me! Ha-ha!But that never happened, and I was starting to scare myselfa little. So in these last few moments before first light, it finally became clear to me what I must do.
I must commit my two-thousand-dollar personal computer to the depths of the lake at the bottom of the hill.
